'Peace, Love, and Harmony: Fasia Jansen's International Activism and Music'

The Global Studies Seminar presents “Peace, Love, and Harmony: Fasia Jansen’s International Activism and Music” by Denison University’s Visiting Associate Professor of German Vanessa Plumly.

Plumly has published widely in the field of Black German Studies, presented her work nationally and internationally, and is currently working on her first solo-authored monograph “In Search of Justice: Black German Aesthetic and Political Disruptions.” She is co-editor of the edited volume “Rethinking Black German Studies: Approaches, Interventions, Histories” and a forthcoming volume on Innovations in Black European Studies with Peter Lang Press, where she is also co-editor of the book series “Imagining Black Europe.” Within the national German Studies Association, she serves on the Institutional Transformation and Social Justice committee and was formerly co-chair of the Black Diaspora Studies Network that she also co-founded. Plumly has taught courses on a wide variety of topics ranging from Contemporary Germany from the Margins to Postwar German Film, Weimar Germany, German-Jewish Identities, Justice in the German-Speaking World, and Black Europe, among many others. 

Active in the German Easter Marches (Ostermärschen) originating in Oberhausen, participating in the women’s peace movement, nuclear disarmament and peace activism, and involved in labor strikes across the Ruhr Valley, Black West German singer-songwriter and political activist (formerly a forced laborer in the concentration camp Neuengamme) Fasia Jansen rallied the masses in protest in post-World War II divided Germany, guitar in hand. As a self-proclaimed socialist and Black feminist, she forged transnational connections via global women’s conferences and international travel. Jansen was both at the epicenter of global movements of the Cold War era while also situated at the margins. No cohesive collective Black movement or freedom struggle existed in Germany; her Blackness occupied a peripheral status, as did her decolonial antinuclear labor. Jansen’s Black Internationalist disarmament work should be read alongside that of Coretta Scott King, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Lorraine Hansberry, Erna Harris, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Kwame Nkrumah of the Cold War period.